Rendering an Image

Find an interesting view of the molecule from the previous
tutorial. Suppose you want to publish this view in a journal and want
a high quality image, or you want to make a large poster. Taking the
image from a screen capture often results in a rather grainy image as the
size of the pixels becomes apparent, so you want something with more
resolution. There are several programs available which can render a
high-quality raster image, based on an input script. VMD has the option
to create input scripts for many of these image processing programs,
which may then be processed to create a higher quality
image of the scene displayed by VMD at the time the script was created.
See Chapter 8 on rendering
for a further description of how this works.

Open the
Render window
and select `Tachyon' from the Render Using menu.
Both of the text boxes will be filled with default values which should
not need to be changed for the purposes of this tutorial.
Press the Start Rendering button.
After a few moments of processing, you sould see the message

Info) Rendering complete.

in the VMD text console.
If everything worked correctly, you will
end up with an image file named plot.dat.tga (on MacOS X or Unix) or
plot.dat.bmp (on Windows) in your current working directory.
This image is in either Windows BMP or Targa graphics format,
and can be read by many programs (such as display,
ipaste, xv, Gimp or Photoshop).